Africa in Europe: Interdependencies, Relocations, and Globalization

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Africa in Europe, in two volumes, meticulously documents Europe's African presence from antiquity to the present. It incorporates findings from areas of study as diverse as physical anthropology, linguistics, social history, social theory, international relations, migrational studies, and globalization. In contrast to most other works focusing on Eurafrican relationships that largely revolve around Atlantic and trans-Atlantic developments since the Age of Global Exploration, this work has a much broader perspective which takes account of human evolution, the history of religion, Judaic studies, Byzantine studies, the history of Islam, and Western intellectual history including social theory.

While the issue of racism in its variant manifestations receives thorough treatment, African in Europe is also about human connections across fluid boundaries that are ancient as well as those that date to the Age of Exploration, the Age of Revolution, and continue until the present. Hence, it brings new clarity to our understanding of such processes as acculturation and assimilation while deepening our understanding of interrelationships among racism, violence, and social identities. This work is full of new insights, fresh interpretations, and highly nuanced analyses relevant to our thinking about territoriality, citizenship, migration, and frontiers in a world that is increasingly globalized. The author moves across boundaries of time and space in ways that result in an encyclopedic work that is an integrated and programmatic whole as well as one in which each chapter is a complete module of scholarship that is self-contained.

Reviews

The first such extensive overview drawn heavily from available scholarly literature, this interpretive textbook makes a very plausible case for reconsidering the anthropological and historical relationship between Africa and Europe within a framework that avoids preoccupation with race and color, rejects a division of Africa into Sub-Saharan and Northern, and discounts the Mediterranean as a significant boundary between the two continents. -- Allison Blakely, Boston University

Author Bio

Stefan Goodwin is the author of Africa's Legacies of Urbanization (Lexington Books 2006).